Background Hubstaff Referral

When choosing a time monitoring tool, it’s important to understand the various types of tools available. Tools such as Mavenlink, Wrike, and Zoho Projects all include robust time monitoring features for professional services companies. On the other hand, the time monitoring features in these tools are available only within bigger project management (PM) suites. As a result, you’re paying much more money for things such as file storage, in-app chat, progress reports, and shift management. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you’ll find pure play time monitoring tools such as Hubstaff (which begins at $5 a month per user) and TSheets, our Editors’ Choice tool for time tracking. Hubstaff Referral

Attributes and Usage

Hubstaff’s user interface (UI) was created with a appealing left-rail blue navigation bar that leaves plenty of room around the right-hand side of your screen for data entry and analysis. When you log into the system, you will be taken to the main dashboard, which gives you an overview of the number of hours your employees have worked this day and the number of hours they’ve worked over the previous seven days. You will also find a list of every member, their most recent jobs, and how busy they have been over the past week. This is a solid PM data visualization which lets you instantly differentiate between workhorses and do-nothings, and it immediately calls to focus projects which are becoming more than sufficient focus and jobs that are being neglected.

There are two methods to put in time in Hubstaff: You are able to construct manual timesheets with past hours worked, or you can use the stopwatch feature on Hubstaff’s native desktop program. With the timesheet attribute, you log in your hours as you likely did with pen and paper during the analog age of time tracking. Essentially, you work your shift, you add time to your own timesheet, and you sign off on it. This is a pretty standard procedure of monitoring time. Regrettably, because Hubstaff doesn’t allow you to add future time, you can’t use the platform as a shift planner. Administrators can let users manually edit previously submitted timesheets, and they’re able to induce users to require a reason to ensure they’re really adding hours they worked. Admins can also set up the system to let users to begin tracking time if they haven’t clocked into the system in a little while.

The next, and most frustrating, way of monitoring time in Hubstaff is by using the stopwatch feature. In each solution we tested, this component is available within the confines of your internet browserevery alternative that’s, except for Hubstaff. With Hubstaff, you are required to download a native desktop application that lives within a separate window. In it, you can select your job, press Start, along with your timer will begin counting. When you’re done, your activity and your screenshots will be sent to the main hub. The native program is going to take a picture at random intervals of up to 3 shots per hour depending on how often the admin would like to spy on workers. Screenshots can be partly blurred to not record sensitive information on each grab, but enough of the display is left unsullied that you’ll still get a feeling of whether the screen is on work-related or play-related content. This can be an annoyingly complicated and complicated way to manually track time, especially if you’re jumping from task to task throughout the day. Hubstaff must discover a way to bring the stopwatch and also screengrab components to the cloud-based architecture to simplify ease of use.

Tracking time in real-time on Hubstaff’s Android and iOS apps is exactly the same as it is on the desktop app. The mobile programs let admins monitor motions via GPS tracking. This gives you an overview of how much motion was done by your worker by capturing location information at distinct stages.

The Schedules tab enables you to assign dates and times for employees to work. You can set a minimum number of hours to operate, a lunch break duration, and you’ll be able to make it a recurring shift. The tool’s reporting applications is terribly basic: You’ll receive access to weekly, daily, project, and penis view reports as well as a”habit” report which lets you filter information from the aforementioned reports. When compared to the PM solutions in this course, Hubstaff’s coverage is utterly embarrassing so, if your target is to understand and evolve based on when and how your employees handle time, you would be better off working using Zoho Projects, our Editors’ Choice for PM.

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Admins receive notifications once they have attained weekly staffing and budget limits. Invoices are automatically calculated and created based on the time each worker worked, in addition to his or her related pay rate. It is possible to set up automatic payroll through PayPal, which enables you to automate payments based on time tracked inside the application. Keep in mind: Consumers don’t have to send time for acceptance, therefore automatic payments will be made whether employees were right or wrong about the number of hours they worked. There’s no reminder for managers to double-check each timesheet ahead of automatic payments move out thus, if you’re worried about making bogus payments, then you can place PayPal payments to manual. Hubstaff Referral

Price And Alternatives

Hubstaff has been built to give you Big Brother-level oversight into when workers are working, what they’re doing while they work, and what you need to cover them as soon as the job is finished. The Basic $5-per-month plan gives you access to simple time monitoring tools, an employee payment schedule manager, 24/7 support, and user settings which may be managed on an employee-by-employee basis. Additionally, this plan lets you keep track of whether or not your employees are working by letting you document screenshots while they work in addition to monitor keyboard and mouse action during changes. Of the five tools we tested, Hubstaff is the only instrument that provided this amount of insight into how employees are progressing. Although screen and keyboard monitoring are helpful (albeit over-reaching) attributes for a change monitor, Hubstaff’s implementation leaves much to be wanted (more about this later).

The $9-per-user-per-month Premium program includes everything you’ll discover in the Basic program, but you will also get access to Hubstaff’s application programming interface (API) to integrate the tool with other third party software. The Premium package also comes with a lightweight schedulingtool that provides administrators the capability to assign changes and delegate tasks from within the console. Premium clients can also use the application to make invoices and make PayPal payments mechanically. Customers that pay yearly will get two weeks free (for both cost tiers).

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In comparison to TSheets, its closest competition in our roundup, Hubstaff is reasonably priced, especially given the extra monitoring features that are unavailable in competitive resources. TSheets supplies a basic free accounts, in addition to a $4-per-user-per-month account that costs a $16 base fee a month for teams with fewer than 100 users, and a $80 base fee per month for teams with more than a hundred users. The base fee, which Hubstaff does not charge, makes TSheets slightly more expensive than Hubstaff, even in Hubstaff’s Premium degree.

If you’re more interested in these hulky PM solutions, then you will need to pony up a bit more cash. Mavenlink’s cheapest program that includes time monitoring prices $39 per user per month. Zoho’s cheapest time tracking plan is $25 a month for an infinite number of users (that is a pretty solid deal if you want all the excess PM attributes ). Wrike’s cheapest time tracking plan prices $24.80 per user per month.

What Should Be Added

Editor’s note: Since our original review of Hubstaff, the business has released a significant upgrade in late 2018 that specifically addressed specific feature weaknesses or omissions, such as adding a web timer, fleshing out reporting choices, and adding activity levels and screen monitoring. We are going to be analyzing these attributes shortly and you will see the results in an upcoming update to this review.

Aside from its draconian screengrab and keystroke monitoring, Hubstaff doesn’t do an excellent job allowing for deeper shift supervision. By way of instance, Hubstaff does not allow advanced tracking. If you run a trucking business and you’re less concerned about how many hours each trucker drove than the distance driven, then there is no way to handle this in Hubstaff. Users can add notes to a empty text area, but that data won’t be mixed into accounts. As a consequence, that you can not use it to find out about who is working, how they’re functioning, and what they are generating (other than the amount of hours monitored ). TSheets not only provides you this choice, it provides you the ability to make six additional customizable advanced monitoring fields. You might even add a query for every clock-out (i.e.,”Was there an incident? Yes. No.”) Along with the system forces the user to respond to the questions at the close of every shift or they won’t be able to clock out.

As hardcore as Hubstaff is all about monitoring work, the tool doesn’t permit for IP address restrictions, so your employees can say they’re working from the workplace but they could actually be operating from a cruise boat in the Bahamas (unless they’re using the mobile program to track time). This is a standard feature that’s available in virtually every other instrument we analyzed. Hubstaff also doesn’t enable admins to need users to snap a photograph if they report to work. I suppose it is overkill to generate somebody take a selfie before you get started recording their display and monitoring their keystrokes, but TSheets enables you to set this as a requirement (which makes sense, especially if you’re monitoring tasks done out of a computer, like electronic, building, or amusement work). The program also doesn’t allow users clock in via a phone call, which is a component TSheets along with other service providers make readily available for employees who don’t have a smartphone.

Monitoring Employee Work

We’ve touched on how a number of Hubstaff’s more Enormous Brother-like attributes factor into time tracking. But the platform also has a lot of the hallmarks of employee monitoring tools. Hubstaff’s employee tracking attributes include keystroke logging, URL and application monitoring, GPS and place tracking, and activity screenshots.

Once you place your customers and they download the timer app onto their machine, the desktop program not only tracks time but will require screenshots randomly or at custom intervals, for example three screenshots per minute. This applies not only to the user’s main display but any connected monitors too. Hubstaff doesn’t log keys but it does monitor the action provided via the mouse and keyboard, providing employers a calculation of how busy the worker is. This data all winds up around the Hubstaff dashboard in the Task tab. This is where you can then pick a user in the drop-down menu to view their screenshots connected with activity data.

When it comes to application and URL monitoring, Hubstaff goes beyond simply tracking time to learn what sites and programs a worker visited or opened and how long they were there. The Reports section can then run custom queries on vectors like program usage mapped against time and action. Hubstaff incorporates with job and job management tools such as Asana and Trello to filter reports from particular projects or tasks to monitor productivity.

1 unique employee tracking feature supplied is GPS location tracking through Hubstaff’s mobile program. While the mobile app can’t take screenshots or catch mobile app and site activity, it lets you track and log place for employees working in the field. While the depth of monitoring surveillance and data features can’t step up to a powerhouse tool for example Teramind, our Editors’ Choice for worker monitoring, Hubstaff includes a helpful choice of features for employers that want a bit more oversight. Hubstaff Referral

Wrap-up

Hubstaff is an easy-to-administer, feature-rich, time monitoring tool. If you are diligent about monitoring employee behavior while on the clock, then there is no better software available than Hubstaff. You’ll have the ability to log screenshots, track keystroke volume, and route movements via GPS monitoring.

Regrettably, if you’re looking for a platform which goes the extra mile to enable customization, atypical information entry, or even a much more sophisticated reporting arrangement, then Hubstaff will not be right for you. In addition, should you opt for a different system, your employees will thank you for not needing them to obtain a secondary program for monitoring time–particularly once you consider that every other tool we examined makes this possible within the boundaries of their online UI. Hubstaff Referral

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